Too many choices, too many providers. How do you make the right decisions? There is no perfect way to make the best choices, but the first decision needed to be agreed upon is that CRM is vital for your sales and marketing effectiveness. In an article published by Destination CRM titled “So Many CRM Service Providers, So Little Time”, you will find some great advice on choosing the right solution and provider for your company. A couple of excerpts from this article state: CRM is foundational to optimizing productivity, performance, and resource utilization, and any best-practice CRM solution will include your objectives for:

improving customer prospecting,

enhancing retention,

expanding a share of customer wallet, and

differentiating service levels based on customer value.

With so many CRM service providers and solutions available, it is often difficult to know how to make the right decision, but I’ll offer a couple of tips that should help point you in the right direction:

First, clearly communicate the most important benefits you wish to gain from your CRM implementation.

Next, determine how you will measure that the CRM installation is meeting your objectives.

The right vendor will understand your most desired benefits and the importance of measuring your objectives. In addition, one of their major objectives will be to know as much about how you do business as you do, so they can work through every aspect of your marketing, selling and customer service processes in order to ensure a successful implementation. Choosing the wrong vendor, or considering CRM just a technology project, are the biggest reasons for the failure of a CRM implementation and can be avoided with the right information. If you are in the process of deciding on CRM solutions or providers, don’t pass on reading the complete article here.